very earnings call from the big holding companies carries the same bass note: digital spend is “resilient,” the migration from linear is “irreversible,” and the internet is the safest acreage on the media map. The headlines nod along, treating the statement like gravity—obvious, immutable, boring. Yet beneath the headline, the ground still jitters. One quarter a coveted beauty segment clears a twelve-dollar CPM on the open exchange; two seasons later, without any warning from the brand trackers, the clearing price has collapsed to four. The audience is still there, the cookies (or what remains of them) are still firing, but the bids whip around like a wind-speed graph in a hurricane. The culprit is not fraud or format fatigue; it is the uneven finish of human connectivity itself.
Roughly one in three humans has still never sent an email. That sounds almost quaint until you realize it represents the single largest pool of surplus attention left on the planet. When a rural province in Indonesia, the Sahel belt, or the high Andes finally gets its first affordable data bundle, the influx is not a gentle trickle—it is a dam burst. Millions of new sessions bloom overnight, each one carrying the low expectations of a first-time scroller. Inventory explodes, supply-side platforms race to tag the impressions, and for a few chaotic weeks the auction math forgets how to price scarcity. CPMs swing not because demand disappears but because the denominator—available eyeballs—has doubled in a postcode that brands haven’t even geofenced yet. Volatility is the market’s way of re-writing the map faster than cartographers can print it.
History keeps a tally of these lurches. When India’s Jio slashed data prices in 2016, average mobile CPMs across Asia-Pacific dropped eighteen percent in a single quarter, even while overall ad spend rose. The new users were poorer, yes, but they were also fresh; no banner blindness, no muscle memory for skipping pre-roll. Luxury brands that had calibrated spend against a narrow slice of metro India suddenly found themselves adjacent to farmers watching tractor reviews, and the algorithms responded with fire-sale pricing until look-alike models caught up. A similar after-shock rippled through LATAM when WhatsApp opened Status ads to global budgets: inventory volumes spiked forty percent overnight, CPMs halved, then clawed back only as fast as local verification vendors could certify legitimate traffic. The pattern repeats wherever the next hundred million come online, and the runway ahead still holds several of those moments.
What keeps the ride from derailing is the longer slope of revenue per user. Each newcomer arrives with a thinner wallet today, but also with a steeper glide path into e-commerce, mobile banking, and subscription habits tomorrow. Penetration curves are predictable; wallet growth curves, even more so. The same auction that punishes premiums in the shock quarter quietly recalibrates once purchase data starts flowing back from retailers and fintech apps. By the time the province you couldn’t spell last year posts its first billion-dollar GMV festival, the CPM has not only recovered—it has overshot, because deterministic purchase signals are the most expensive targeting tax advertisers will ever pay.
So the smart money tolerates the tremors. It knows that volatility is the admission ticket to a carnival that is still half-built. Ninety-nine percent connectivity is at least a decade away; until then, every new undersea cable, every low-orbit satellite batch, every government spectrum auction will jolt the pricing floor. The trick is to stay diversified enough to survive the dips and patient enough to harvest the eventual compression of supply. The internet is not a mature asset class; it is an emerging continent where the coastline keeps redraw-ing itself. Buy the coastline, endure the waves, and remember that the only thing more expensive than volatile CPMs is sitting on the sidelines while the last great mass of human attention steps through the gateway for the very first time.